The Science and Philosophy of the "Thermodynamic School" of Evolution
Charlie Hall and Timothy McWhirter are presenting two paper at this conference. The first one is entitled “Energy and Evolution: The Systems Approach.” It will be presented Wednesday, August 5, between 1:00 and 2:30. The second paper is entitled “The Evolution of Power and Entropy Production.” It will be presented Friday, August 7th, at 12:30…
This is a presentation for the International Society of Systems Sciences that summaries a book project that Charles Hall and Timothy McWhirter are working on presently.
This chapter was written by Roderick C. Dewar and Amos Maritan and published in 2014. The abstract states what follows. Maximum entropy production (MaxEP) is a conjectured selection criterion for the stationary states of non-equilibrium systems. In the absence of a firm theoretical basis, MaxEP has largely been applied in an ad hoc manner. Consequently…
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This paper was written by E. D. Schneider and J. J. Kay and published in 1994. The title provides a clear view of the focus of the paper. One of the many interesting things about this paper is that the authors make this case regarding life and the second law without utilizing the concept of…
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This paper was written by Luis Bettencourt and published in 2024. It is part of an elaborate project of the Sante Fe Institute to chart the course of the development of complex-systems science by discussing eighty-nine revolutionary works originally published between 1922 and 2000. Bettencourt’s paper begins volume one by focuses on the papers that…
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This book was edited by Charles A. S. Hall and published in 1995. It is a synthesis of the creative genius of Howard Thomas Odum as seen through his own words and those of his students, many of whom are now applying his ideas to the world in diverse ways. Offering the holistic, system-oriented thinking…
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This paper was written by James Brown, Charles A. S. Hall, and Richard Sibly and published in 2018. This is one of the first papers that describes the equal fitness paradigm (EFP), which explains how energy is used by organisms in accordance with biological scaling relations to produce surviving offspring. The authors provide evidence that…
This paper was written by Charles A. S. Hall and Timothy McWhirter and published in 2023. It provides a review of the development and use of the maximum power principle in evolutionary theory, ecology, and economics. It includes a discussion of how Alfred Lotka and H. T. Odum both described the maximum power principle applying…
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This paper was written by Chams Lahlou and Laurent Truffet and published in 2020. It provides a mathematical proof of the maximum empower principle using an axiomatic basis developed recently by Le Corre and Truffet. The abstract states: “Self-organization is a process where order of a whole system arises out of local interactions between small…
This paper was written by Linjun Li, Hongfang Lu, David R. Tilley, Hai Ren, and Weijun Shen and published in 2012. It is based on a project intended to test the validity of the maximum empower principle in the self-organization of forest ecosystems by applying an ecosystem model to simulate the dynamics of three forest plantations in south China during 1985-2007. The abstract states:…